Google likely to launch Dropbox-like cloud storage service soon

Search king Google is close to launching its own cloud storage service similar to Dropbox and Amazon CloudDrive, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

If the report holds true, Google will be entering an extremely crowded market with a product simply called Drive. (No relation to the awesome Ryan Gosling movie.) On top of Dropbox and Amazon, the market consists of strong players like Microsoft SkyDrive, Box, SugerSync, and many others.

Drive’s … Continue Reading

Nivio pulls in $21M to make cloud computing cheaper and more student-friendly

Cloud computing and desktop virtualization are rapidly growing trends in the tech world, and one company has spent a considerable amount of time developing this technology. Nivio, which started as an idea in 2004, announced today it has received $21 million in its first round of venture capital funding.

Nivio lets you store up to 10GB of your documents, music, and movies in the cloud for free with nDrive. Your files sync across all of … Continue Reading

Cloud companies rejoice: Amazon S3 lowers prices for storing your precious terabytes

Amazon Web Services, the world’s largest cloud infrastructure provider, has lowered the price of S3 cloud storage for its basic U.S. customers, the company announced today.

Just last week, AWS reported massive growth for objects stored in S3, with a staggering 192 percent increase year-over-year. At the end of 2011, there were 762 billion objects stored in Amazon S3, which is 500 billion more objects than the same period in 2010. And now all those … Continue Reading

SocialFolders backs up your Facebook photos & Google Docs on your hard drive

With cloud computing all the rage these days, we often have files and bits of data that live exclusively on a server far away from our hard drives. And while that’s often really awesome, sometimes you want and need a backup of that information on your computer. Enter SocialFolders, a service that backs up your social and cloud data to your hard drive.

“SocialFolders was basically created to help people manage their content on social … Continue Reading

Clouds in the forecast: Amazon S3 grew 192% year-over-year

Keep your eyes to sky because clouds are in the forecast. Amazon Web Services has reported massive growth for its number of objects stored in the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), with a 192 percent increase year-over-year.

Amazon Web Services is by far the most popular cloud infrastructure provider in the world, so measuring the number of objects stored in S3 can help us quantify just how ubiquitous the service is. Jeff Barr, Senior Manager … Continue Reading

Following Megaupload takedown, FileSonic & FileServe remove sharing features

After employees of file-sharing services Megaupload were arrested, similar digital locker services FileSonic, FileServe, and others have stopped allowing users to share the files they upload with others,

The “cyberlocker” provided by these companies is essentially a cloud service that allows people to upload a number of different files that can be shared/downloaded by others for a limited period of time (or permanently for premium customers).  The move to shutter this functionality by FileSonic, FileServe, … Continue Reading

Jive stock up nearly 30 percent at close of its first trading day

Jive Software kicked off its initial public offering at $12 a share on the Nasdaq this morning, and closed nearly 30 percent up at $15.05.

The company produces social business software, which enterprises use as an internal communication system outside of the traditional e-mail and instant message options. Competitors of Jive include startups Yammer and Moxie, plus Salesforce’s Chatter. Jive filed to go public in August of this year and offered 13.4 million shares, raking … Continue Reading

Box spruces up iOS apps with photo and search functions

Cloud storage company Box updated its iPhone and iPad apps today, realizing that the world outside the office is no longer an oyster, but a giant second office.

Box has seen people using mobile devices to access the company’s file storage grow 30 times in the last year, and they blame that increase on the mobile workforce. Our whole culture around communication has changed. Once upon a time, we called house and work landlines and … Continue Reading

Box giving HP business customers new cloud options on PCs

A number of Hewlett-Packard PCs are getting new cloud options through a partnership with Box today.

Box offers enterprise cloud storage and file sharing services and is partnering with enterprise hardware makers for an easy in to those companies’ customers. The offers include 10 GB of cloud storage plus the option to upgrade, with HP’s Compaq Pro 6005 and 6200 series PCs. With an HP Compaq Elite 8200, Box is offering unlimited storage for a … Continue Reading

10 disruptive cloud companies we’re excited about

There is so much happening right now in emerging cloud computing — the entire economy is being disrupted by the trend.

With publicly-traded giants like Amazon, Google, VMWare, Microsoft, Cisco and Salesforce lurching around with new and improved services that can help businesses with cost and efficiency gains, sometimes it’s easy to miss the hot players that are up-and-coming.

We’ve assembled a list of ten private cloud companies that we think are particularly intriguing — … Continue Reading

Apple is removing cloud music apps from the App Store

[This story has been updated with additional information below...]

In the latest example of Apple’s fear of competition, the company has removed a third-party app from its App Store that allows people to access music stored on Amazon’s Cloud Drive.

Amazon’s Cloud Drive is a direct competitor of Apple’s iCloud service, which stores a variety of content — music, books, photos, contacts, calendars, and more — associated with a person’s Apple ID account and pushes … Continue Reading

SolidFire raises $25M to boost cloud provider agility and performance

SolidFire, a solid-state storage provider for cloud services, has raised a new $25 million round of funding to help improve performance and reliability for emerging cloud providers, the company revealed Monday.

SolidFire sells powerful solid-state hard drives to cloud service providers, which in turn boost performance and reliability of said cloud services. Along with the hardware, SolidFire gives cloud providers tools that can help automate how they use storage systems, which creates a higher degree … Continue Reading

Dropbox closes a jaw-dropping $250M round

Cloud storage startup Dropbox has secured a new $250 million dollar round of funding, the company announced today.

Dropbox’s service lets people store their documents, photos, video and other files in a personal folder. The files are easy to share and accessible no matter your location. The company has over 45 million users in 175 countries that save upwards of a billion files every three days. The service is on track to triple its user … Continue Reading

Box.net closes extension round worth $81M

Cloud storage provider Box.net today announced it has closed an $81 million extension to its fourth round of funding, which includes new investors New Enterprise Associates and Bessemer Venture Partners.

The new round gives Box.net, which has evolved into a provider of back-end storage on remote servers for enterprise applications, a lot of cash to make a mad grab in what has become a land rush in the enterprise software space. Box.net chief executive Aaron … Continue Reading

Can you recover lost data from Google Apps? (Infographic)

Cloud-based social media data backup service Backupify has released a new report on data loss via Google Apps services.

Backupify’s service creates a backup archive of all the information from a person’s various social media and web application accounts. The archive of information includes data from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Apps accounts and others. Users can also download local copies of their data in addition to having it stored.

Backupify’s report, titled “Causes and Solutions … Continue Reading

Box.net founder Aaron Levie is poised on the edge of startup stardom

The first time I met Box.net chief executive Aaron Levie, he showed me a magic trick with a deck of cards.

A year later, the 26-year-old was standing on stage (in his typical electric orange sneakers) in front of 350 customers and press at his company’s first annual conference, BoxWorks, held yesterday in San Francisco. He had just turned down a buyout offer worth more than $500 million. That evening, Box.net hosted a party where … Continue Reading

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Box.net hooks up with Chatter, now pre-loaded on Motorola Xoom

Cloud storage provider Box.net will now work with Salesforce.com’s enterprise social network, Chatter, and its mobile application will now come pre-loaded on the Motorola Xoom tablet, the company announced today.

Box.net is now shipping its content over to Salesforce.com’s enterprise social network Chatter. Users can pull content from Box.net — like shared files and the comments attached to those files — in activity streams in Chatter. Chatter had around 60,000 customers when last reported, although … Continue Reading

Xtium raises $11.5M to expand pay-as-you-grow virtual private cloud services

Major cloud computing services provider Xtium has raised $11.5 million to expand its reach in helping mid-size companies with private cloud computing, virtual hosting and virtual disaster recovery.

Xtium is one of the leading infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers in the U.S., but it has to compete with major players like Amazon and IBM. The company offers as pay-as-you-grow model to businesses that allows for more flexibility when companies need back-end solutions like virtualization, servers and storage. … Continue Reading

HTC and Dropbox to give new Android phones 5GB free cloud storage

Device manufacturer HTC has partnered with Dropbox to give 5GB of free cloud storage to new HTC Android phone owners using the new Sense 3.5 interface, according to Pocket-lint.

With Apple soon launching its iCloud storage service and Microsoft pushing its Skydrive, the level at which mobile devices interact with the cloud appears to be intensifying. The HTC-Dropbox partnership will make it possible for users to access and store all kinds of files like music, … Continue Reading